If you’re like me, a lot of the claims that are in this book will initially sound incredibly far-fetched…but then you start looking around online and see that you can actually find much of it already happening. Also, Bill Gates once said that co-author Ray Kurzweil is “the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Not a bad recommendation.
The basic thesis of the book is that there are three “bridges” that we can (or will be able to) make use of to keep ourselves alive and healthy for a very long time. Bridge One is various supplementation therapies that are available today. Stuff like taking leucine to help prevent macular degeneration. Bridge Two, still mostly in the (very near) future, are biotech therapies that allow people to directly combat disease and aging. We can already do some of this today, but technologies like implanting a rice grain-sized sensor into a patient’s heart are still very much in their infancy. Finally, Brdge Three is still in the future, about twenty years out, according to Kurzweil, and consists of using nanotechnology to do things like replace (and improve) bloodcells, skin tissue, take over liver function, etc.
The idea is to use Bridges One and Two to keep yourself in one piece long enough to stay alive to see Bridge Three therapies become commonly available. Once this happens, the human lifespan will be dramatically lengthened, to the point that the subtitle of the book is “Live long enough to live forever”.
Again, some radical ideas floating around in there, but – also again – Kurzweil has an impressive history of being right about this sort of thing. On a slightly more mundane level, it was refreshing to see not one but two authors (M.D. Terry Grossman co-wrote the book) who managed to get pretty much everything about hormone cascades, exercise and supplementation correct. (Even if they did give ten times as many pages to aerobic exercise as they did to weight training.) How often does that happen in a mainstream book?
For those who are interested in reading more about the future of technology (not just limited to health-related fields) there is a Ray Kurzweil reader available online for free. It is “a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world… The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as “How to Build a Brain”), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to “The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine” and “Human Body Version 2.0.” It’s available here.
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